Lizbeth Peraza, Carissa Laca, Lindsey Ortiz, Aidan Sedillo.

Sponsor or Client: 

Title:

The Influence National Identity and Political Ideology Have on Attitudes Towards Immigration

Abstract:

Some studies have looked into explaining why others may feel differently about immigration due to Nativism (Young, 229). The idea of putting immigration restrictions to allow native-born citizens to have more opportunities. Others have gone into the group threat theory route to explain racial prejudice and the ”conflict between dominant and subordinate groups” (Alvarado, 3); as well as sociotropic threats (Hopkins, 21) such as employment, income, and education. Thus, taking a quantitative approach, this explanatory study will compare the effects of a stronger national identity combined with political ideology and the attitudes it produces towards immigration. We hypothesized that a stronger alignment with the national identity theory the more likely the individual has a negative attitude towards immigration. We surveyed 130 individuals in a mid-sized midwestern University via a qualtrics survey. This survey included questions that measured the individual’s political ideology and pride in their country based on national identity theory. As well as control variables such as sex, religion, age, etc to determine attitudes toward immigration. OLS regression is an appropriate analysis because our dependent variable was measured at the interval level. Our data is forthcoming.